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In 2008, as the GFC was taking hold, Lowy opened Westfield London. Its scale was mesmerising, prompting one commentator to declare this wasn't a shopping centre, this was a new planet glowing in the economic gloom.

Situated in west London with 28 million customer visits a year, it has transformed the shopping landscape of the city.

In 2011, in the east of London, he opened another centre that formed the gateway to the British Olympic site. Westfield Stratford City was part of the largest urban regeneration project ever undertaken in the UK.

It created 10,000 permanent new jobs from day one and at the opening, the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said not since the Middle Ages had anything triggered such regeneration in the city.

Father and sons (l to r) Peter, Frank, David and Steven – in 2011 outside Westfield's former Sydney HQ.
Dean Moncho

When Johnson visited Australia in 2013 he said from his very first meeting with Lowy, he'd been "bowled over" by Westfield's ambition for London and by the potential it saw.

At the time, he described Westfield "as London's biggest foreign investor in bricks and mortar".

Lowy, now 86, predicted these two developments would become the two highest-grossing malls in the UK. Today they are Europe's two largest urban shopping centres and Westfield is now planning to build a third in Croydon, in the south of London.

It's a long way from Nazi occupied Budapest in 1944 where Lowy's warm feeling for things British began. In a bunker, he and others would huddle around an illegal radio to wait for BBC broadcasts, rung in by the bells of Big Ben.

The Lowy family in Budapest in 1943, a year before Nazi occupation in March 1944. (l to r) Edith, Ilona, John, Frank (in school uniform), Alex and Hugo.
supplied

Not only did the BBC raise their morale with its reports of allied victories, it also repeatedly broadcast news of deportations and urged Hungarians to obstruct them in the name of humanity.

Frank hadn't yet heard anyone else speak of humanity in the context of Jews. He would never forget it.

"Today, those chimes still ring in memories for me," he says, explaining that he continues to think of the British as humane and to associate them with freedom.

He says this even though they held him in a detention camp for three months.

August 1946: Two boats carrying illegal immigrants to Palestine are tied together and put under arrest just outside the port of Haifa. Frank Lowy, 15, without family or friends, was on the larger boat called Yagur.
Supplied

After the war, aged 15, Lowy tried to make his way to British Mandated Palestine. He boarded a creaky boat in France, built to carry less than 100 passengers but with more than 700 on board.

"The sea was rough and I was sea sick and very, very lonely," he recalls. "There was little food and water and I felt frightened. I was homesick and missed mother very much."

But before the boat reached the port of Haifa, it was intercepted by British warships. While the passengers regarded themselves as refugees, the British classified them as illegal immigrants.

They were herded off the boat at gunpoint, disinfected, loaded onto a British prison ship and transported to Cyprus.

Seventeen-year-old Frank Lowy in army uniform in Israel 1948.
supplied

It was in the detention camp on Cyprus, complete with barbed wire, guards and watch towers, that Lowy came to appreciate the British. He observed them carefully.

"We didn't fear them. They were just doing their job and were not cruel like the Nazis or the Russians. There was no hatred and we were never afraid they would shoot at us.

"And when there was an outbreak of impetigo [a contagious skin infection], they treated us and did so with kindness."

Three months later Lowy was on the first boat load of children to be sent back to Palestine. By 17, he was in an elite commando unit, fighting for the independence of the state of Israel.

When the war was over, he stayed until 1952 before joining his mother and the surviving members of his family who had made it to Australia.

In Sydney, he and fellow emigre John Saunders created Westfield. When Australia's foreign investment rules changed in the mid-1970s, their minds turned to London.

They would sit in their shared office dreaming of coaxing Londoners off the windy high street and into their climate-controlled mall. They made some attempts to get a toehold there, but never managed.

The very thing that made London an attractive prospect – the shortage of shopping centres – made finding a suitable one all the more difficult.

Frank Lowy (right) arrives in Sydney on Australia Day 1952 and is, at last, reunited with his family.

After their partnership broke up, Lowy kept trying and in 2000 had some success. Westfield acquired several malls dotted around the UK, but none in London.

He persisted and four years later began negotiating on the two London sites now in full operation.

Once established in the UK, Lowy became involved in a number of philanthropic activities that reflected his attachment to the country. These included the Cabinet Office War Rooms, the Imperial War Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

As a boy, Lowy had imagined Winston Churchill as "a beacon of hope". When he heard his distinctive voice over the crackling BBC, Lowy didn't understand the words but he understood the sentiment.

This came flooding back to him in 2010, when he was invited to 10 Downing Street for the first time.

"I remembered all the things we hoped for and expected from Churchill and as I walked up those stairs, past two of his portraits, my head was awash with the meaning of it all," he says.

The officers ushering him in would just have seen an older man in a suit. But for a few heightened moments, within Lowy, the past was colliding with the present.

He had to compose himself before he reached Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the top of the staircase.

Frank Lowy at the launch of his biography in 2015, with his wife Shirley and former Prime Minister John Howard
Steven Siewert

Lowy is proud Westfield has a successful business in London and says having it recognised is very pleasing.

"On behalf of my colleagues at Westfield and my family, I want to place on record my appreciation for this honour and recommit myself and our company to making a contribution to the economy and people of the UK."